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Cheddar Man Discovered to Have Had Dark Skin, Blues Eyes in Ancient Britain

Scientists discovered that Britian’s oldest skeleton had dark skin and blue eyes — not light skin like they previously thought. “Cheddar Man” is Britain’s oldest complete skeleton found in 1903 near Cheddar Gorge in Southwest England. According to BBC, Cheddar Man lived 10,000 years ago. Until now, researchers assumed he had light skin and fair hair.

But after analyzing DNA from Cheddar Man’s skull, scientists realized he had dark to black skin and dark curly hair.

“I’ve been studying the Cheddar Man’s skeleton for more than 40 years, so it’s incredible now to have the DNA data that really shows us what this guy looked like, the hair the eyes, that combination of blue eyes and dark skin, really very striking something that we wouldn't have imagined.” Professor Chris Stringer of the Natural History Museum stated. “It’s very striking for a ten-thousand-year-old human, our expectations a few years ago our expectations a few years ago would have been that this individual would have had maybe dark hair but fairly pale skin, possibly blue eyes, and what we’ve got is a quite unusual combination of this dark, slightly curly hair, really quite dark skin and quite striking blue eyes.”

The findings suggest lighter skin developed later in Europeans and that skin color didn’t indicate geographic region like we thought. Modern day Europeans share about 10% of their makeup with early humans like Cheddar Man.

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